AMD still needs to shave the idle power by a factor of 5 to get into tablets and 10 to get into smartphones. I think they can do it, but Bobcat is not the chip for that market.
Even though AMD is not mentioned in TFA there is still a picture of an AMD guy with a wafer (even though ARM doesn't even contract out chip manufacture much less have its own fabs). Silly journalists, TLAs are for engineers.
I've been hearing about how ARM is going to destroy Intel for the last 5 years at least and I haven't seen the products yet despite the promises thrown about with the Cortex A9. It looks like the cortex A15 willl be able to beat Medfield... but you aren't getting those A15s in large quantities until next year when Intel will have the next iteration of Atom ready anyway. Oh and 64 bit? That's gone from an insanely important feature when Intel didn't have it to being useless bloat when Intel does have it and ARM doesn't, but it's OK because in 2015 you might be able to get an ARM chip with 64 bit support....
Since 2008 when the much derided Atom debuted, Intel has gone from not having anything that could remotely run a smartphone or tablet to having Medfield, which is competitive although not industry leading in the smartphone and table space. I have yet to see ARM come out with anything that even threatens a run of the mill Core 2 yet... so why is ARM talking so much trash?
It might be that ARM is a little more nervous that there is finally some real competition in the mobile space, which is a boon to consumers. I'd like to see AMD get an x86 solution down into this power envelope too so that there would be multiple competitors on the x86 side as well.
So on this website whenever Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, etc. do anything that America doesn't like it's universally applauded as "standing up against evil imperialist right-wing Chrisitan America" No matter how bad or destructive the action, it's OK because it's "speaking truth to power" or some nonsense.
Now we have Canada basically saying that it's going to use its own oil, and the exact same people are going apoplectic. International intervention suddenly become
Note that these same people are strangely silent when Brazil or Venezuela develop new oil resources, and I haven't heard any huge outrage over the fact that drilling off the coast of Cuba will put oil rigs just a few miles from the Florida Keys. The same people who complain that America == Somalia (you've seen those posts) because we don't have the federal government in control of all economic activity never complain when foreign corporations drill for oil righ in the middle of sensitive areas.. as long as the money will be going to a government they approve of.
I've come to realize that environmental movement doesn't really care about what is done to the planet, only on who is doing it. Put up a windmill in America that a bird might run into? Destroying the world! Use nuclear power in Japan? CHINA SYNDROME! Setup nuclear plants in Iran that are known to be using unsafe designs that are intended to produce weapons-grade plutonium instead of producing electricity? No problem. Put an oil pipeline directly through the rainforest in Venezuela to prop up Hugo Chavez? That's a wonder of the world showing how great socialism is!
I've seen it all before and this is just a thin coating of green paint on a corrupt and broken set of ideas.
What sort of Nazi Deathcamp are they running in Hawaii where those poor innocent students are *forced* at gunpoint to use gmail?!?!?!!?
Next thing you know, those sub-human Nazi scum administrators will force the students to attend classes only in predetermined lecture halls based on a nazi-inspired "class schedule" They may even commit the ultimate crime against humanity by having those evil capitalist schill professors force the students to use textbooks and even do "coursework"!!!
This story is the ultimate proof that America is corrupt and evil. At no time in human history has any institution sunk to this level of pure evil. Obviously this is 100% Bush's fault since Hawaii is completely controlled by right-wing capitalist Republican Christian-Nazis.
The Internet is not and never was designed to be "anonymous" despite the popular myths online. People confuse "anonymity" with the fact that the Internet does not provide any good mechanisms to verify who you are actually dealing with (SSL certificates are a semi-useful additional layer designed to fix that issue).
Go back to the earliest days of the Internet and the WWW and you'll see that it was actually the opposite of anonymity. It was a bunch of physicists who wanted people to actually read their papers and give them grants;-)
The quick sync hardware is part of the IGP block but it is specialized hardware specifically geared towards transcoding. For example, it is not using the main GPU pipeline and shader hardware to do the transcoding.
The GPU isn't meant to do everything. If it were, there wouldn't be a CPU. Considering the hatred that was poured on Quicksync here, and that Quicksync still produces better quality Transcodes than GPUs while being substantially faster, I don't think we'll be seeing the end of CPU transcoding anytime soon.
Hey, thanks for the tip, I'll try it out. I haven't tried LXDE, should I?
LXDE is good for its intended purpose, which is to be a light-weight desktop with a window manager and a few utilities. I prefer KDE for the high degree of customizability, but LXDE is simpler and more straightforward than Gnome or KDE.
How does crap like this get modded insightful? Oh wait.. it's because it plays up to the bigoted prejudices that prevail on this site.
1. I've actually used the Windows 8 preview on a 4 year old PC and it is more responsive than Linux for desktop use. I don't like Metro, but everything under the hood in Windows 8 is in very good shape and some changes to the UI could make it a good successor to Windows 7.
People on this website who brag about being Linux "experts" because they got Ubuntu to boot one time should know the difference between the UI presentation layer and the underlying OS services. Unfortunately a bunch of self-proclaimed "experts" who troll this site are anything but.
2. I also use KDE on the desktop and I've used LXDE. Guess what? KDE is faster for my use because of the ability to reconfigure its setup. I don't want or need a taskbar to switch between apps, and because of KDE's flexibility I have a very efficient keyboard shortcut system in place to handle window management. Additinally, yakuake gives KDE a big edge for handling the konsole in a smart way and guake (which cloned yakuake) is still not as good.
Firefox under KDE starts up in the same amount of time as on LXDE.. and so does every other application I try. Windows don't move faster across the screen on LXDE either and they resize at the same speed on both desktops!
B&N simply cares about not allowing FUD to be sold in its stores! The banned article is obviously M$ sponsored FUD because it says that Linux boxes can be hacked, which all of us Slashdot users know is physically impossible because of the OSRGF (Open Source Reality Generation Field). I mean it's simple physics: somebody could read the Open Source code and find bugs. Multiple universes exist where all bugs are found. Therefore, all bugs are found, fixed, and patched automatically, making it impossible to hack Linux. Watch some more Star Trek and learn your physics people!
I applaud B&N for taking a stand against the spread of M$ sponsored FUD like this.
If this were a CEO, doctor, or lawyer who made less than half of what this guy makes and were arrested for something that wasn't related to infringing IP rights then the usual lynch mob would be out screaming about how all "rich" people are evil and we need to destroy Wallstreet and kill all the Republicans, ban Faux News, etc. etc. [insert administration approved Media Matters talking points here].
When the perpetrator is a guy who got rich by getting kickbacks to facilitate piracy, however, he's suddenly some Robin Hood hero who takes from the evil rich music & movie companies to give to uh... himself. Suddenly he's no longer an evil 1%er and is our new personal hero just like Michael Moore & Bill Maher.
Yeah discovered an annoying bug when upgraded from 3.4 to 3.5 recently. The 3.5 version 1. refuses to use any of the perfectly functional cutom templates that I had made in 3.4 2. Barfs every time it starts up complaining that a "template already exists" and then subsequently refuses to use the template that already exists.... (this has shades of that !#%(&*!(%#& normal.dot in MS office).
Fortunately the error isn't fatal and I can continue to use the program, but even a trivial test of the upgrade program would have uncovered this bug well before 3.5 was considered "ready" for use. I'm not the only one who's experienced this problem either.
I'm sure that the fact that Intel's main competitor is building a new fab in Upstate New York with the strong added backing of IBM (based in Armonk, NY) had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS LAWSUIT.
Nope, politicians in New York are completely uncorruptable and would never try to do a shakedown of a competitor to in-state businesses in order to gain political capital for a run as governor and to finance the sweetheart deals they give out to attract business in the first place.
Ahh Unity100 just waiting for your moronic comments about how the entire world just isn't "worthy" enough to be blessed by AMD's God-Like perfection. P.S. --> You are full of crap with those numbers, go a real site like.. uh.. AMD's own marketing blogs and they'll quote you 1 - 2%. You're 28% is pulled from your backside, which does not count.
Please do tell us all about miracle software patches for Windows in an article about supercomputers that will never see a single Windows installation. Please tell us all about what you've learned from AMD marketing now that they've fired all they're employees. Please tell us more about how you ripped off PHP software from legitimate open source projects, resell it as close sourced software in violation of the licenses, and then prattle on about how you know more than anyone else about supercomputing.... AGAIN.
You raise an interesting point. The usual level of Slashdot "commentary" on Supercomputers usually isn't much above the level of jokes about Crysis and pissing matches between AMD ARM and Intel fanboys. Slashdot generally misses those little trivial details like... does it actually work doing something other than a meaningless Top500 benchmark.
I've been hearing ad-nauseum about how all ARM has to do to destroy x86 in the desktop market is to flip a couple of bits and they'll have "good enough" performance while using zero-point energy that produces free power and unicorns since about 2006. In the meantime, the exact same people who say that ARM is "good enough" rip dual-core Atoms for being too slow (while the single-core Medefield I just linked to is faster than dual--core A9's in the Iphone 4S and Galaxy Nexus, while using less power).
I've also heard about how the A15 will completely blow Intel away when it finally shows up blah blah blah (I heard the exact same story about the A9 cores btw, and Intel is still in business).
What I have yet to see is ARM *really* ratchet up performance... and no, I'm not saying that they need to beat Ivy Bridge... I'm saying they need to *approximate* a mobile 1.8Ghz Core 2 from about 2006 to get that "good enough" performance. I have yet to see that chip, and for all you fanboys out there, the A15 is *not* that chip (it'll likely finally beat a single-core Atom from 2008... but remember the single-core Atom was never good enough to begin with!). Intel has closed the gap for x86... it's a done deal, and no amount of "ARM is magical" will change the laws of physics.
ARM has *NOT* closed the performance gap with x86, and when you add in all the cache, real memory controllers (not those jokes used in current ARM designs) and I/O controllers needed to do real work, your ARM chip will end up using just as much power as a competitive x86, no matter how many forums you go on to brag about the superioirity of the ARM instruction set that doesn't even do 64 bit, and which you never even write assembler for anyway.
UH... CPUs used in a supercomputer have fuckall to do with the CPU that I would want to use in any standard PC, mobile device, or even a regular server for that matter. Cray made a deal with AMD in 2005 (back when they WERE the faster chip) and is basically stuck with AMD for the foreseeable future due to being tied to AMD's hypertransport. The interconnect is what matters, not the CPU.
You want the fastest supercomputer in the world? Guess what: it uses SPARC chips. Now I'm sure you hate Intel enough to convince yourself that you should go out and only use SPARC chips since they are 'teh fastest' , but believe me, you wouldn't like the results.
Considering benchmarks of freshly release Interlagos servers with 32 cores only beat Intel models from 2010 with 12 cores by 20% at best... while losing at other benchmarks (and cost over twice as much so STFU before you go on about how "cheap" the AMD solution is) you get a good idea as to why AMD's share of the server market is 5% when it was more than 25% just a few years ago.
If AMD kicked out their PR department and replaced them with your semi-coherent fanboy rants, then I'd say they made a mistake. Fortunately, it looks like you don't get paid to do marketing for AMD... and from the looks of the knock-off PHP plugins that you likely plagiarized from open-source projects and then re-sell, you aren't making money from practically anywhere else either.
So a few points about this rather bizarre announcement:
1. Unfortunately for AMD this does nothing to reduce the power consumption of Bulldozer which is higher than a 3960x at stock speeds. When you remember that over 1/3 of the transistors on the CPU (using the new 1.2 Billion transistor count) are in the L3 cache that only runs at 2.2 Ghz while the L3 on the 3960x runs at full-speed, you have to wonder at whether GloFo's 32 nm process has some fundamental flaws, or if AMD didn't listen to GloFo's design rules (or some of both).
2. AMD's and GloFo's combined marketing of their "gate-first" 32 nm process bragged loudly and repeatedly that gate-first (as opposed to gate-last used by Intel) gave 20%+ transistor density benefits and that Intel's process wasn't truly 32 nm. Well, when Bulldozer was reported to have a die area of 315 mm^2 and a 2 billion transistor count, this seemed like a justified advantage. Now, however, the transistor density of Bulldozer is lower than any other 32nm design from either AMD or Intel. Note: the same AMD PR guys that adjusted the transistor count confirmed that the 315 mm^2 die size is still accurate.
Rory Read is smart to shift the focus away from these unmanufacturable monsters and to put it on the next-generation of Bobcat and Trinity designs where AMD can actually leverage it's only real advantage over Intel: the GPU.
1. Nobody with a sig advertizing knock-off PHP plugins even has the right to use the word "supercomputer" in a sentence.
2. Supercomputers are NOT built based on processor speed. If you took the SPARC CPUs used in the K computer (the worlds fastest and *not* running opterons) and put them into a regular server or desktop, then you'd have a pretty underwhelming computer. Most of the $$$ going into supercomputers goes to the interconnects, not the CPUs. So sure, use the opterons in the supercomputer where AMD sells them at firesale prices and does not make any money. The rest of us will use Xeons and be very happy with the results.
3. You are a well known AMD fanboi and your repetitive posts are becoming less and less amusing.
--> Call me when you have actual benchmarks of Interlagos, You don't have them either. What's amusing is that I'm using known data from 1/2 of an interlagos chip (Bulldozer) at much higher clockspeeds than what Interlagos will operate at to make my assumptions. There's plenty of data from just the 6 core 3960 and 3930 chips that came out today that indicate that even desktop Bulldozer x 2 with theoretically perfect scaling won't beat the upcoming Xeons. You ain't gonna get perfect scaling and you ain't gonna get desktop Bulldozer clock speeds. You're just hoping that reading John Fruehe's blog will result in a miracle.
--> and finally decide that explicitly parallel jobs benefit more from actual cores than from hyperthreading.
Nobody has ever argued that hyperthreading is better than *real* cores. AMD's problem is that they didn't really introduce *real* cores but this bizzaro quasi core setup. In practice it looks like AMD's solution is about on par with hyperthreading, so you can insult Intel all you want and scream MOAR COARSS just like AMD told you to, but that won't make Interlagos magically destroy Intel.
Oh.. and integrated memory controller: 1. The 486 had one too. 2. Look at Bulldozer's atrocious memory performance: There's a difference between slapping any memory controller on-die and slapping a *good* memory controller on-die. Intel has the good one.
Slashdot Mirror
My Fusion-based netbook idles at 9 or 10 watts.
AMD still needs to shave the idle power by a factor of 5 to get into tablets and 10 to get into smartphones. I think they can do it, but Bobcat is not the chip for that market.
Even though AMD is not mentioned in TFA there is still a picture of an AMD guy with a wafer (even though ARM doesn't even contract out chip manufacture much less have its own fabs). Silly journalists, TLAs are for engineers.
I've been hearing about how ARM is going to destroy Intel for the last 5 years at least and I haven't seen the products yet despite the promises thrown about with the Cortex A9. It looks like the cortex A15 willl be able to beat Medfield... but you aren't getting those A15s in large quantities until next year when Intel will have the next iteration of Atom ready anyway. Oh and 64 bit? That's gone from an insanely important feature when Intel didn't have it to being useless bloat when Intel does have it and ARM doesn't, but it's OK because in 2015 you might be able to get an ARM chip with 64 bit support....
Since 2008 when the much derided Atom debuted, Intel has gone from not having anything that could remotely run a smartphone or tablet to having Medfield, which is competitive although not industry leading in the smartphone and table space. I have yet to see ARM come out with anything that even threatens a run of the mill Core 2 yet... so why is ARM talking so much trash?
It might be that ARM is a little more nervous that there is finally some real competition in the mobile space, which is a boon to consumers. I'd like to see AMD get an x86 solution down into this power envelope too so that there would be multiple competitors on the x86 side as well.
So on this website whenever Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, etc. do anything that America doesn't like it's universally applauded as "standing up against evil imperialist right-wing Chrisitan America" No matter how bad or destructive the action, it's OK because it's "speaking truth to power" or some nonsense.
Now we have Canada basically saying that it's going to use its own oil, and the exact same people are going apoplectic. International intervention suddenly become
Note that these same people are strangely silent when Brazil or Venezuela develop new oil resources, and I haven't heard any huge outrage over the fact that drilling off the coast of Cuba will put oil rigs just a few miles from the Florida Keys. The same people who complain that America == Somalia (you've seen those posts) because we don't have the federal government in control of all economic activity never complain when foreign corporations drill for oil righ in the middle of sensitive areas.. as long as the money will be going to a government they approve of.
I've come to realize that environmental movement doesn't really care about what is done to the planet, only on who is doing it. Put up a windmill in America that a bird might run into? Destroying the world! Use nuclear power in Japan? CHINA SYNDROME! Setup nuclear plants in Iran that are known to be using unsafe designs that are intended to produce weapons-grade plutonium instead of producing electricity? No problem. Put an oil pipeline directly through the rainforest in Venezuela to prop up Hugo Chavez? That's a wonder of the world showing how great socialism is!
I've seen it all before and this is just a thin coating of green paint on a corrupt and broken set of ideas.
What sort of Nazi Deathcamp are they running in Hawaii where those poor innocent students are *forced* at gunpoint to use gmail?!?!?!!?
Next thing you know, those sub-human Nazi scum administrators will force the students to attend classes only in predetermined lecture halls based on a nazi-inspired "class schedule" They may even commit the ultimate crime against humanity by having those evil capitalist schill professors force the students to use textbooks and even do "coursework"!!!
This story is the ultimate proof that America is corrupt and evil. At no time in human history has any institution sunk to this level of pure evil. Obviously this is 100% Bush's fault since Hawaii is completely controlled by right-wing capitalist Republican Christian-Nazis.
Now mod me up +5 for bashing America.
The Internet is not and never was designed to be "anonymous" despite the popular myths online. People confuse "anonymity" with the fact that the Internet does not provide any good mechanisms to verify who you are actually dealing with (SSL certificates are a semi-useful additional layer designed to fix that issue).
Go back to the earliest days of the Internet and the WWW and you'll see that it was actually the opposite of anonymity. It was a bunch of physicists who wanted people to actually read their papers and give them grants ;-)
The quick sync hardware is part of the IGP block but it is specialized hardware specifically geared towards transcoding. For example, it is not using the main GPU pipeline and shader hardware to do the transcoding.
The GPU isn't meant to do everything. If it were, there wouldn't be a CPU. Considering the hatred that was poured on Quicksync here, and that Quicksync still produces better quality Transcodes than GPUs while being substantially faster, I don't think we'll be seeing the end of CPU transcoding anytime soon.
LXDE is good for its intended purpose, which is to be a light-weight desktop with a window manager and a few utilities. I prefer KDE for the high degree of customizability, but LXDE is simpler and more straightforward than Gnome or KDE.
How does crap like this get modded insightful? Oh wait.. it's because it plays up to the bigoted prejudices that prevail on this site.
1. I've actually used the Windows 8 preview on a 4 year old PC and it is more responsive than Linux for desktop use. I don't like Metro, but everything under the hood in Windows 8 is in very good shape and some changes to the UI could make it a good successor to Windows 7.
People on this website who brag about being Linux "experts" because they got Ubuntu to boot one time should know the difference between the UI presentation layer and the underlying OS services. Unfortunately a bunch of self-proclaimed "experts" who troll this site are anything but.
2. I also use KDE on the desktop and I've used LXDE. Guess what? KDE is faster for my use because of the ability to reconfigure its setup. I don't want or need a taskbar to switch between apps, and because of KDE's flexibility I have a very efficient keyboard shortcut system in place to handle window management. Additinally, yakuake gives KDE a big edge for handling the konsole in a smart way and guake (which cloned yakuake) is still not as good.
Firefox under KDE starts up in the same amount of time as on LXDE.. and so does every other application I try. Windows don't move faster across the screen on LXDE either and they resize at the same speed on both desktops!
B&N simply cares about not allowing FUD to be sold in its stores! The banned article is obviously M$ sponsored FUD because it says that Linux boxes can be hacked, which all of us Slashdot users know is physically impossible because of the OSRGF (Open Source Reality Generation Field). I mean it's simple physics: somebody could read the Open Source code and find bugs. Multiple universes exist where all bugs are found. Therefore, all bugs are found, fixed, and patched automatically, making it impossible to hack Linux. Watch some more Star Trek and learn your physics people!
I applaud B&N for taking a stand against the spread of M$ sponsored FUD like this.
They were uber controll freaks... Controlling information of their own "trusted" employees was part of D.C.'s daily routine.
Wait you said they got rid of the old staff? You just described the Obama administration there so why would they want to get rid of anybody like that?
If this were a CEO, doctor, or lawyer who made less than half of what this guy makes and were arrested for something that wasn't related to infringing IP rights then the usual lynch mob would be out screaming about how all "rich" people are evil and we need to destroy Wallstreet and kill all the Republicans, ban Faux News, etc. etc. [insert administration approved Media Matters talking points here].
When the perpetrator is a guy who got rich by getting kickbacks to facilitate piracy, however, he's suddenly some Robin Hood hero who takes from the evil rich music & movie companies to give to uh... himself. Suddenly he's no longer an evil 1%er and is our new personal hero just like Michael Moore & Bill Maher.
Yeah discovered an annoying bug when upgraded from 3.4 to 3.5 recently. The 3.5 version 1. refuses to use any of the perfectly functional cutom templates that I had made in 3.4 2. Barfs every time it starts up complaining that a "template already exists" and then subsequently refuses to use the template that already exists.... (this has shades of that !#%(&*!(%#& normal.dot in MS office).
Fortunately the error isn't fatal and I can continue to use the program, but even a trivial test of the upgrade program would have uncovered this bug well before 3.5 was considered "ready" for use. I'm not the only one who's experienced this problem either.
I'm sure that the fact that Intel's main competitor is building a new fab in Upstate New York with the strong added backing of IBM (based in Armonk, NY) had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS LAWSUIT.
Nope, politicians in New York are completely uncorruptable and would never try to do a shakedown of a competitor to in-state businesses in order to gain political capital for a run as governor and to finance the sweetheart deals they give out to attract business in the first place.
P.S. --> INTEL ALWAYS BAD!! AMD ALWAYS GOOD!! (keep the blind faith!)
Ahh Unity100 just waiting for your moronic comments about how the entire world just isn't "worthy" enough to be blessed by AMD's God-Like perfection. P.S. --> You are full of crap with those numbers, go a real site like.. uh.. AMD's own marketing blogs and they'll quote you 1 - 2%. You're 28% is pulled from your backside, which does not count.
Please do tell us all about miracle software patches for Windows in an article about supercomputers that will never see a single Windows installation. Please tell us all about what you've learned from AMD marketing now that they've fired all they're employees. Please tell us more about how you ripped off PHP software from legitimate open source projects, resell it as close sourced software in violation of the licenses, and then prattle on about how you know more than anyone else about supercomputing.... AGAIN.
With fans like you, AMD doesn't need enemies.
You raise an interesting point. The usual level of Slashdot "commentary" on Supercomputers usually isn't much above the level of jokes about Crysis and pissing matches between AMD ARM and Intel fanboys. Slashdot generally misses those little trivial details like... does it actually work doing something other than a meaningless Top500 benchmark.
Before I being, bear in mind, the whole annoying mantra that x86 will NEVER compete with ARM in low-power applications has just been shot out of the water: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5365/intels-medfield-atom-z2460-arrive-for-smartphones
I've been hearing ad-nauseum about how all ARM has to do to destroy x86 in the desktop market is to flip a couple of bits and they'll have "good enough" performance while using zero-point energy that produces free power and unicorns since about 2006. In the meantime, the exact same people who say that ARM is "good enough" rip dual-core Atoms for being too slow (while the single-core Medefield I just linked to is faster than dual--core A9's in the Iphone 4S and Galaxy Nexus, while using less power).
I've also heard about how the A15 will completely blow Intel away when it finally shows up blah blah blah (I heard the exact same story about the A9 cores btw, and Intel is still in business).
What I have yet to see is ARM *really* ratchet up performance... and no, I'm not saying that they need to beat Ivy Bridge... I'm saying they need to *approximate* a mobile 1.8Ghz Core 2 from about 2006 to get that "good enough" performance. I have yet to see that chip, and for all you fanboys out there, the A15 is *not* that chip (it'll likely finally beat a single-core Atom from 2008... but remember the single-core Atom was never good enough to begin with!). Intel has closed the gap for x86... it's a done deal, and no amount of "ARM is magical" will change the laws of physics.
ARM has *NOT* closed the performance gap with x86, and when you add in all the cache, real memory controllers (not those jokes used in current ARM designs) and I/O controllers needed to do real work, your ARM chip will end up using just as much power as a competitive x86, no matter how many forums you go on to brag about the superioirity of the ARM instruction set that doesn't even do 64 bit, and which you never even write assembler for anyway.
UH... CPUs used in a supercomputer have fuckall to do with the CPU that I would want to use in any standard PC, mobile device, or even a regular server for that matter. Cray made a deal with AMD in 2005 (back when they WERE the faster chip) and is basically stuck with AMD for the foreseeable future due to being tied to AMD's hypertransport. The interconnect is what matters, not the CPU.
You want the fastest supercomputer in the world? Guess what: it uses SPARC chips. Now I'm sure you hate Intel enough to convince yourself that you should go out and only use SPARC chips since they are 'teh fastest' , but believe me, you wouldn't like the results.
Considering benchmarks of freshly release Interlagos servers with 32 cores only beat Intel models from 2010 with 12 cores by 20% at best... while losing at other benchmarks (and cost over twice as much so STFU before you go on about how "cheap" the AMD solution is) you get a good idea as to why AMD's share of the server market is 5% when it was more than 25% just a few years ago.
If AMD kicked out their PR department and replaced them with your semi-coherent fanboy rants, then I'd say they made a mistake. Fortunately, it looks like you don't get paid to do marketing for AMD... and from the looks of the knock-off PHP plugins that you likely plagiarized from open-source projects and then re-sell, you aren't making money from practically anywhere else either.
So a few points about this rather bizarre announcement:
1. Unfortunately for AMD this does nothing to reduce the power consumption of Bulldozer which is higher than a 3960x at stock speeds. When you remember that over 1/3 of the transistors on the CPU (using the new 1.2 Billion transistor count) are in the L3 cache that only runs at 2.2 Ghz while the L3 on the 3960x runs at full-speed, you have to wonder at whether GloFo's 32 nm process has some fundamental flaws, or if AMD didn't listen to GloFo's design rules (or some of both).
2. AMD's and GloFo's combined marketing of their "gate-first" 32 nm process bragged loudly and repeatedly that gate-first (as opposed to gate-last used by Intel) gave 20%+ transistor density benefits and that Intel's process wasn't truly 32 nm. Well, when Bulldozer was reported to have a die area of 315 mm^2 and a 2 billion transistor count, this seemed like a justified advantage. Now, however, the transistor density of Bulldozer is lower than any other 32nm design from either AMD or Intel. Note: the same AMD PR guys that adjusted the transistor count confirmed that the 315 mm^2 die size is still accurate.
Rory Read is smart to shift the focus away from these unmanufacturable monsters and to put it on the next-generation of Bobcat and Trinity designs where AMD can actually leverage it's only real advantage over Intel: the GPU.
1. Nobody with a sig advertizing knock-off PHP plugins even has the right to use the word "supercomputer" in a sentence.
2. Supercomputers are NOT built based on processor speed. If you took the SPARC CPUs used in the K computer (the worlds fastest and *not* running opterons) and put them into a regular server or desktop, then you'd have a pretty underwhelming computer. Most of the $$$ going into supercomputers goes to the interconnects, not the CPUs. So sure, use the opterons in the supercomputer where AMD sells them at firesale prices and does not make any money. The rest of us will use Xeons and be very happy with the results.
3. You are a well known AMD fanboi and your repetitive posts are becoming less and less amusing.
ARM chips using PowerVR Graphics: Amazing!
Intel chips using (literally the exact same) PowerVR Graphics: Intel Graphics Sux0rz!
Par for the coarse on this site.
--> Call me when you have actual benchmarks of Interlagos,
You don't have them either. What's amusing is that I'm using known data from 1/2 of an interlagos chip (Bulldozer) at much higher clockspeeds than what Interlagos will operate at to make my assumptions. There's plenty of data from just the 6 core 3960 and 3930 chips that came out today that indicate that even desktop Bulldozer x 2 with theoretically perfect scaling won't beat the upcoming Xeons. You ain't gonna get perfect scaling and you ain't gonna get desktop Bulldozer clock speeds. You're just hoping that reading John Fruehe's blog will result in a miracle.
--> and finally decide that explicitly parallel jobs benefit more from actual cores than from hyperthreading.
Nobody has ever argued that hyperthreading is better than *real* cores. AMD's problem is that they didn't really introduce *real* cores but this bizzaro quasi core setup. In practice it looks like AMD's solution is about on par with hyperthreading, so you can insult Intel all you want and scream MOAR COARSS just like AMD told you to, but that won't make Interlagos magically destroy Intel.
Oh.. and integrated memory controller:
1. The 486 had one too.
2. Look at Bulldozer's atrocious memory performance: There's a difference between slapping any memory controller on-die and slapping a *good* memory controller on-die. Intel has the good one.